Spyraflo bearings selected for Robotic Dispensing System

A new dispensing machine had some tough design criteria to meet to become what is claimed to be the fastest, most productive and accurate retail robotic dispensing system in the World. The RDS (Robotic Dispensing System) was developed to automate dispensing pharmaceutical transactions with 100 per cent accuracy at the rate of 150-plus transactions per hour.

The challenge facing the designers was to develop a unit that was operationally fast and compact but with a very high capacity. Equally important was the need to satisfy the 'public location' of such equipment that clearly needed to be quiet, plus the machine had to be reliable and bring substantial gains in productivity.

Many alternative standard bearings from other manufacturers were considered, all of which could meet the base specifications, but they all failed in three crucial areas. First was compactness (whereas the Spyraflo bearing is a real space saver) and second was their cost-effectiveness due to the patented self-clinching capability, which saves on machining and components. The third major reason for selecting Spyraflo bearings was the self-aligning feature of the 6mm and 12mm Delrin flange-mount bearings.

Special designs and applications

The machine has met all its designers' objectives and now this highly successful RDS can handle up to 65 per cent of a pharmacy's total prescription volume with a process that selects and labels a vial, then counts, caps and sorts a script by patient last name.

In addition to the wide range of standard flange-mount designs available, Spyraflo has produced many special flange designs for a wide cross-section of industries and applications. The many designs incorporate various flange materials, profiles, mounting variables and positioning features. Also, Spyraflo engineers incorporate the innovative self-clinching, self-aligning bearing features into many special designs.

Micromech is the UK and Eire distributor for Spyraflo bearings.